Upgrade to remove ads
Only $35.99/year

Surveys I, II, and III (Dr. Alkhateeb)

Terms in this set (89)

Refers to the number of people who answered a survey, divided by the number of people in the sample:
Response rate
Response rate is usually expressed in which form?
Percentage
What are 3 things that may affect survey response rate?
- Number of calls/contacts
- Use of incentives
- Survey length
The growth in the number of unsolicited telephone calls has also resulted in people employing ______.
More sophisticated technology for screening their calls
High response rate promotes ______ in results.
Confidence
Low response rate increases the likelihood of ______.
Biased results
______ promotes confidence in results.
High response rate
______ increases the likelihood of biased results.
Low response rate
A response rate of anything under ____ is a warning.
60%
Why is a high return important?
It's the only way to know if your results are representative
What are the keys to getting a high response rate?
- The survey is a topic of interest to the respondents (saliency)
- Personalized requests and communications related to the survey
- KISS: keep it short and simple
- Follow-up
- Trust, respect, like the sponsor
If response rate is low you should:
- Use language that is suggestive rather than decisive (e.g. "the data suggests")
- Don't generalize findings to the entire group
- Clearly describe who responded (who the data represents)
What do surveys measure?
Behavior
Attitudes
Beliefs
_______: a favorable or unfavorable evaluation of something. Generally positive or negative views of a person, place, thing, or event.
Attitudes
_____: the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.
Belief
______: the manner in which one behaves. The actions or reactions of a person or animal in response to external or internal stimuli.
Behavior
_____ are a systematic way of asking people to volunteer information about their attitudes, behaviors, opinions, and beliefs.
Surveys
The success of survey research rests on how _____ the answers people give to survey questions _____ reality, (how people really think and act).
Closely
Match
- Describes phenomena and summarizes them.
- The goal of using surveys for this is to get a precise measurement of specific concepts (e.g. depression, QoL).
Descriptive research
- Measures associations (e.g. chemotherapy and quality of life)
- The data from surveys can provide causal explanation to phenomena (e.g. why teens become pregnant).
Causal explanation
"I am satisfied with my job" is a survey question that would measure _____.
Attitudes
"I believe in life after death" is a survey question that measures _____.
Belief
"How often have you smoked marijuana in the last year" is a survey question that measures _____.
Behavior
"How old are you?" is a survey question that measures _____.
Attributes (demographic characteristics)
What are the different types of survey questions?
- Open-ended response
- Closed response
- Agreement and rating scales
- Ranking scales
- Partially open response
Type of question where the respondent writes response in own words:
Open-ended question
Open-ended questions are frequently used in ______ studies to facilitate a better understanding of a concept.
Exploratory
T/F: It is a good idea to always include an open-ended question giving the respondent the opportunity to add any additional comments?
True
What are the advantages to an open-ended question?
- Allows the respondent to answer the question with few limitations
- Report more information that with discrete answers
What are the disadvantages to an open-ended question?
- Need qualitative methods or coding system to analyze the responses
- Requires subjective judgements
What type of survey questions are "multiple-choice" variety where a person has to choose among several possible answers?
Closed response
What are the two types of closed response questions?
1) Ordered answer choices represent points along a continuum (e.g. pain scale)
2) Unordered answer choices with each choice being an independent answer (e.g. ethnicity)
What are the advantages of closed response questions?
- Quicker and easier to answer
- Easier to tabulate and analyze
- List of possible responses helps participant understand the meaning of the question
What are the disadvantages of closed response questions?
- Do not allow participants to express their own answers
- Set of answers may not be exhaustive
- Must be clear about the selection of items, one or as many as possible
What type of survey questions require specific short answers that do not encourage free expression?
Partially open response
Partially open response questions are a compromise between:
Closed response and open response forms
What type of survey question might provide "other" as a category where a person can provide additional information.
Partially open response
What type of survey question might have this format: "Rank the following activities from most common to least common."
Ranking questions
In ______, end points are identified by adjectives and phrases. (e.g. a five point Likert scale with steps labeled Strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, and strongly disagree).
Agreement scales
What are the different modes of survey administration?
- Personal (face-to-face)
- Telephone
- Mail
- Web
- Combination of mehtods
What factors are involved in how you will decide the mode of data collection?
- Population
- Characteristics of the sample
- Types of questions
- Question topic
- Response rate
- Cost
- Time
What are the advantages of personal (face-to-face) survey administration?
- Generally yields the highest cooperation
- Allows for longer, more complex interviews
- High response quality
- Takes advantage of interviewer presence
What are the disadvantages of personal (face-to-face) survey administration?
- Most costly mode of administration
- Longer data collection period
- Interviewer concerns or bias
What are the advantages of telephone survey administration?
- Less expensive than personal interviews
- Samples of general population
- Shorter data collection period than personal interviews
- Better response rate than main for list samples
What are the disadvantages of telephone survey administration?
- Biased agains households without telephones or unlisted numbers
- Questionnaire constraints
- Difficult to administer questionnaires on sensitive or complex topics
What are the advantages of mail survey administration?
- Generally lowest cost
- Can be administered by a smaller team of people (no field staff)
- Access to otherwise difficult to locate, busy populations
What are the disadvantages of mail survey administration?
- Most difficult to obtain cooperation
- No interviewer involved in data collection
- More likely to need incentive for respondents
- Slower data collection period than telephone
What are the advantages of web survey administration?
- Lower cost (no paper, postage, mailing, data entry costs)
- Can reach international populations
- Complex skip patterns can me programed
- Sample size can be greater
What are the disadvantages of web survey administration?
- ?% of all households own a personal computer
- ?% of all households have internet access
- Representative samples are difficult- cannot generate random samples of general population
- Differences in capabilities of people's computers and software for accessing web surveys
- Different ISPs/line speeds limits extent of graphics that can be used
Which type of survey administration is most costly?
Face-to-face (personal)
Which type of survey administration has the highest response rate?
Face-to-face (personal)
What type of survey administration is the best for sensitive questions?
Mail
T/F: Good questions in a survey will cover many topics in the single question?
False; good questions have only one part
In survey writing, every respondent should understand the questions, so it is important to keep the reading level _______ the average reading level of the population.
At or below
If you are giving a survey to a particular group you may want to use words that ______.
A common to the group
Why should you avoid simple "yes" or "no" type answers?
You should try to measure intensity if possible
T/F: Initial questions affects answers to subsequent questions?
True
T/F: You should start your survey with easy questions?
True
T/F: You should cluster questions addressing the same topic/concept together?
True
The tendency for a respondent to answer a series of questions in a certain direction regardless of their content:
Response set
What is one technique to prevent response sets?
Reverse the wording in some of the survey items
______ is phrased in such a way that suggests to the respondent that the researcher expects a certain answer.
A leading (loaded) question
"Don't you agree that social workers should earn more money than they currently earn?" is an example of _____.
A leading (loaded) question
If you use a negative word like "not", consider highlighting the word by ______ or _____ it to catch the respondent's attention.
Underlining
Bolding
What is included in the brief explanation/instructions to the respondent?
- Purpose of the survey
- Significance of the answers
- How to answer the questions
- Stress: confidentiality of responses or Anonymity
What is the difference between confidentiality and anonymity?
Confidentiality means the researchers will know the identity of the respondents, but will protect the identity from others.
Anonymity means not even the researchers will know the identity of the respondents
Be sure to _____ the survey instrument before the actual administration, especially if it is a new instrument you constructed or has not been previously used in your population of interest.
Pilot test
What main things doe a pilot test measure?
- Question clarity
- Questionnaire format
- Variance in responses
As a "hint" what should mail surveys include?
- Survey instrument
- Return envelope (self-addressed and self stamped)
- Cover letter
T/F: You should open surveys as they are returned?
True
What should be done when monitoring survey returns?
- Open surveys as they are returned
- Assign a unique ID number (if not already assigned)
- Stamp date on survey
- Track number of returns daily
Optimal survey response occurs within ____ reminders.
2
Expecting to obtain the same information time after time:
Reliability
Reliability is assessed by ______.
Correlation coefficient
Measures the concept it's intended to measure:
Validity
Information collected appears to be what was expected:
Face validity
Obtained by administering the same test on two or more successive occasions and then correlating the scores:
Test-retest reliability
_______ is a statistic that reflects reliability, is correlation coefficient, and the higher the better.
Test-retest reliability
Obtained by correlating the scores on several questions that pertain to the same content to the sum of the total scores:
Internal consistency
The _______ is a measure of how consistently people respond to related items on a test.
Average item-total correlation
Internal consistency measures:
Compatibility (? I think)
T/F: Relatively few refusals provide the theoretical potential for introducing considerable error into estimates of the sample characteristics?
True
What factors are mail questionnaires susceptible to that can affect response rate?
- Interest in the subject of the questionnaire
- Ability of the respondent to provide written responses
- People with less education are underrepresented
The process of converting information into a quantifiable format (usually numerical) so that a systematic analysis of the information can be done:
Coding
T/F: Statistical analysis does not require numbers?
False
If a survey has a missing value(s) should you assign a number to represent the missing values?
Yes; replace them with the mean values.
Data from a survey is generally organized in a ______.
Spreadsheet
Generally, the first column of a data table will have a _____ that will _____ the survey.
Unique ID
Identify
To make it easier (data collection) each column is given a ______ that refers to the question number or subject on the survey.
Unique short name
Sets with similar terms